Clay, a developmental psychologist, teacher, school psychologist, and researcher from New Zealand, offers classroom teachers, student-teachers, administrators, and researchers a guide containing assessment tasks designed for the systematic observation of young children as they learn to read and write, viewing them as more useful than standardized tests and informal observations. She describes the reading and writing processes, assisting young children making slow progress, and the observation survey tasks, which relate to concepts about print, reading continuous texts, letter identification, word reading, writing vocabulary, and hearing and recording sounds in words. She explains how to summarize results using stanine tables and apply the information in teaching. Tables for New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and the US are included. This edition adds updated assessment statistics and new studies. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)